


Hell is empty (all the devils of Verona)

by azurish



Category: Romeo And Juliet - All Media Types, Romeo And Juliet - Shakespeare
Genre: Abuse, Abusive Relationships, Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Internalized Homophobia, Lust, M/M, Queer Themes, Violence, hints of one-sided benvolio/romeo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-15
Updated: 2013-10-15
Packaged: 2017-12-29 11:36:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1004965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azurish/pseuds/azurish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"There was not a single soul still living who had ever <i>seen</i> Benvolio for what he was.  No one was left who knew what he looked like naked, exposed, laid bare.  He’d given up confessing the sins written in the Bible and his dreams years and years ago – no more quiet words reluctantly given over to the priest about men and the way he <i>saw</i> men and the way he thought about men – and now the men who’d had him were dead, and no one knew his truths but God himself.<br/>Then again, Verona had burned like Sodom and Gomorrah, so maybe God was witness enough to damn him after all."</p><p>Benvolio is more lost than any of them realize, and Verona is no place for a lost soul.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hell is empty (all the devils of Verona)

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for internalized homophobia, gendered slurs applied in a homophobic manner, abusive relationships, and some violence. ... this is not a friendly fic, basically, and on the off-chance that you came here because you liked other things I wrote, uh, probably turn back now.

           Every man who had ever fucked Benvolio was dead.

            They’d bled out in the streets and now they were rotting in their graves, and the flesh that had once been warm and sweat-slick against Benvolio’s body was as cold as ash in a grate hours after the fire had died.

            There was not a single soul still living who had ever _seen_ Benvolio for what he was.  No one was left who knew what he looked like naked, exposed, laid bare.  He’d given up confessing the sins written in the Bible and his dreams years and years ago – no more quiet words reluctantly given over to the priest about men and the way he _saw_ men and the way he thought about men – and now the men who’d had him were dead, and no one knew his truths but God himself.

            Then again, Verona had burned like Sodom and Gomorrah, so maybe God was witness enough to damn him after all.

            Tybalt had fucked him like a Capulet fucked a Montague, angry and hard, like their bodies were battlegrounds.  There had been a vicious cruelty in the snap of his hips, and the fingerprint bruises left on Benvolio’s thighs, mottled purple against his soft, pale flesh, felt like battle scars later.  Tybalt had started out silent, and the rough grunts and slapping of skin against skin seemed unbearable to Benvolio in the darkness – but then Tybalt began to speak in a low, dark hiss that rose to an angry growl and it was so, so much worse.  The words he said burrowed into Benvolio’s mind like his hands sank into his skin and his cock fucked into his body.  Tybalt called him a whore and a Montague bitch and after he had come himself, he dragged an orgasm out of Benvolio with the same rough, sword-callused hands that would one day kill Mercutio.  (Had Montague Romeo fucked his Capulet Juliet this way on their wedding night?  Benvolio liked to think not.  Benvolio liked to think that Romeo had held her and carded his fingers through her hair and run his hands along the contours of her body like she was something holy.  And when he’d sunk into her, Benvolio liked to believe that he’d kissed her, gently, lips as soft against her as the feather down in the pillows on their wedding bed, and waited for her to tell him to go on.)

            Tybalt left Benvolio alone and shaking in the aftermath.

            Hours later, Benvolio had skimmed his fingers across the bite mark on his shoulder and shuddered, his gut roiling with a sick, confused mess of shame and juddering need.

            Tybalt had fucked him a few times more after that.  They always met in back alleys and secluded, secret rooms, as if Benvolio were a cheap whore, not a man.  The realization finally floated to the top of Benvolio’s conscious mind late one night, while he was sitting alone in a room booked a few hours longer, his trousers still down around his ankles and his shirt on the dirty wood floor.  Tybalt didn’t _want_ him as a man.  Tybalt didn’t _want_ a man, Tybalt didn’t want to _want_ a man, and every time he tangled his fingers in Benvolio’s short hair and _pulled_ or scratched his fingernails down Benvolio’s back, he was trying to – destroy something inside of himself, as much as something in Benvolio.

            Benvolio choked on the realization.  He couldn’t breathe for it, and the hot, smoky air in the room caught in his lungs, thick and sick and dizzying.  His head spun.  He had – the _reason_ he had kept coming back, kept _coming_ at Tybalt’s beck and call, was because for once, finally, he thought he had found another man who was willing to lie, as a man, with him.  But to realize now that all along, Tybalt had been cannibalizing him, devouring what he wouldn’t admit he needed and casting aside the rest …

            Benvolio’s eyes stung and he closed them against the smoky lamp light.  His fingernails bit into the skin of his palms and his teeth bit into his lip until he bled, coppery and hot against his tongue.  Slowly, his heartbeat steadied in his ears and he sat and listened, beat after beat, to the blood rushing through his bruised, battered body.  When he opened his eyes again, they were dry and his sight was clear.

            Mercutio’s eyes were black and his smile was dangerous, and Benvolio thought he was half-mad when they first met.  He was mercurial in every sense of the word: divine, unpredictable, poisonous, celestial.  He was a black hole and Benvolio was just so much light, teetering on his event horizon.

            And then suddenly he _wasn’t_ , suddenly he was a comet blazing down towards Earth, and Benvolio watched him streak across his sky from the ground until abruptly, unexpectedly, _inevitably_ , he crashed into him.

            Mercutio fucked him like he was a man, and for the first time, Benvolio felt alive.  Mercutio kissed fire into his mouth and Benvolio bucked up under him like a live wire.  Mercutio pulled his hair one night and stroked it the next and he always, always touched Benvolio like he watched to burn his flesh into the skin of his palms.  He was lean and strong and raw around him, and his eyes flashed with satisfaction when Benvolio moaned and he laughed like a mad thing, quiet and low, when Benvolio keened.  He swallowed Benvolio down like he wanted to suck the very life out of him, held his hips to the bed with a lean, iron bar of an arm and forced him to take what he was given.  When he fucked into Benvolio, his hands were like brands on his hipbones and his black eyes penetrated his soul as his cock entered his body.  He took everything Benvolio had and forced it back onto him tenfold.  And afterwards – afterwards he stayed, splayed out on the bed next to him.

            One day, Benvolio looked at the quicksilver gleam in Mercutio’s eyes and the rictus grin always sloppily tucked away into his lips and realized that Mercutio _needed_ him the way he needed Mercutio.  Relief hit him like a tidal wave, and he drowned in it.  Mercutio might whisper blasphemy into his ears or push him so hard that he was too spent to move when they were done, but Mercutio needed him.

            Then Benvolio learned that he was wrong.  He had mistaken “used” for “needed” this time, and it was almost worse this way around.  Mercutio spun out of control like a car crash and Benvolio realized that he had been watching him guzzle gasoline the whole time, and now he’d swallowed a lit match.

            Metamorphosed into flame, Mercutio bled out his life into the dusty streets of Verona and all over Benvolio’s pale arms.  The explosion took Tybalt too – grinning, cruel Tybalt, who, in the end, was human and could burn up just like Benvolio – by way of Romeo, and then the whole city was ablaze.  Benvolio lied, as he had been lying all along, and the Prince’s words were tongues of flame and Verona burned.  Next Paris, then Romeo (oh, _Romeo_ ), and then Juliet, too.

            Verona lost her youth.

            Afterwards (because improbably enough there was an afterwards, after immolation of the world), the parts of Benvolio that survived – that limped along through empty streets every day and saw faces that were now gone in every step, in every dream, in every moment – were alone once again.  Every man who had ever known him was gone.  He and God were his only witnesses now.  The city was as quiet and still and foreign as a mausoleum, and time ate away at the bones of the men who had fucked him.

            They thought Benvolio was their last living hope.  He saw it in their kind eyes and their sad smiles and the way they touched him – sterile, soothing, approving pats on his back or touches to his elbow from the fathers and mothers without children.  He’d thought the same thing too, once.  He’d thought he was water to the other youths’ fire, still and cool and calm where the rest of them were hot-headed.  He had thought he was reasonable and kind, gentle and quiet.  He mediated conflict; he swallowed down the parts of himself that couldn’t be and let disturbances ripple away into nothing across his surface.

            But Tybalt and then Mercutio had dragged him down from that, shown him that he was as human as any of them.  He needed men and he _wanted_ men and they would never let him be again.  He had fallen like an angel, and in this city-hell of men who burned, Benvolio had been kindling: ash was all that was left of him.

**Author's Note:**

> ... I have no fucking clue where this came from, I swear to God. I've always had a thing for Benvolio, but I never realized that "thing" meant "desire to write super intense darkfic with internalized homophobia and abuse and Biblical references". *shrug* OH WELL.
> 
> Read through by the wonderful absynthe--minded over on tumblr, who then assured me that all the sex and violence was not gratuitous at all! Thanks. <3
> 
> Comments make me a really happy writer? (... and could also reassure me that I haven't just traumatized myself via my own writing.)
> 
> (Also, on tumblr at http://azurish.tumblr.com/post/64089548472/hell-is-empty-all-the-devils-of-verona-benvolio-fic, in case you wanted to share it with your followers or something wild like that. ;))


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